An Actuation Conflicts Management Flow for Smart IoT-based Systems

IoT-based applications have long been limited to collecting field information; at the edge of their underlying infrastructure, IoT devices utilization is mainly motivated by their capacity at gathering environmental information from sensors as means to support users in decision making. However, in numerous domains like home automation, smart factory, intelligent transportation systems, etc., so-called `smart' IoT-based applications also involve devices interacting with the physical environment through actuators. Throughout their life cycle, from the design, the deployment to operation, the ability to prevent conflicting actuation commands and antagonistic effects (possibly harmful), represents a new challenge in the realm of trustworthy smart IoT-based applications. In this paper, we introduce a complete flow for identifying and resolving actuation conflicts at design time. The proposed approach is part of the DevOps software development life cycle. It advocates the reuse of conflict management solutions through local resolution strategies, considering asynchronous timings of targeted hardware platforms they are deployed on. An illustration of the flow is provided on a use-case.